A French lawmaker stresses the rights of Crimean Tatars are completely observed

SIMFEROPOL, July 29. /TASS/. The rights of the Tatar minority in Crimea are completely observed, French National Assembly member and co-chairman of the Franco-Russian Dialogue Association Thierry Mariani, who is leading a delegation of French lawmakers on athree-day visit to Crimea, said on Friday.

"The rights of Crimean Tatars are completely observed. I would say they are observed even better that the rights of Russian-speakers in the Baltic republics. This is how it is," he said after a meeting with speaker of the Crimean parliament Vladimir Konstantinov.

"The issue of Crimean Tatars have been permanently sidelined in the past year at European venues," Leonid Slutsky, the chairman of the committee for the affairs of the commonwealth of Independent States of the Russian State Duma lower parliament house, who is accompanying the French delegation, said.

"It is a kind of a ‘rotten apple’ meant to spoil the real stat of things in Crimea as it fills the European information and political space with negative vibes," he said.

He said that the French delegation raised the issues of the Tatar minority with the local authorities and such discussions proved that "this problem is not a problem at all." "The Crimean Tatars are not aggrieved, the language is supported," Slutsky said.